THE WELFARE JUNGLE

We don’t need food stamps. We share a happy
meal and we’re fine.

And one day my son the busdriver
will drive YOUR children to school

There
are a lot of jobless in America. There are a lot of single parents here, too.
What is to be their fate?Newt Gingrich (named after a reptile) reflected
the heartless tone going on in Washington (with the right wing or G.O.P) the
day in 1996 that he proposed ‘parents who can’t get jobs should have their children
taken away from them and put in public institutions—no giving the
parents welfare!’ That indicated that the DEMISE OF WELFARE-ball was rolling
south and would crunch the massive entitlement program for the poor. The
LIBERAL MEDIA went WILD! He was called a Grinch. (Odd that the letters
needed for the word ‘GRINCH’ are contained within his name.) Shortly afterward,
Clinton gutted Welfare. A jobless mother and father could no longer
dare ask for welfare. The father would have to move out of the house for
his wife to seek aid as a single parent. No matter where the father hid, the
government would pursue him, threatening Poppa with jail if he couldn’t raise
child support each month to pay Gov back for its aid. Plenty of men were
imprisoned and there were fathers who simply suicided.

Over-the-top tpre-esting of the waters by some pundit has
frequently presaged changes in law which Clinton did shortly afterwards, in 1996. There’s always a test balloon in the media,
for a war, a new law. Nazi Geneticists toyed with ridding the concept of
gassing homosexuals, retards, miscreants and cripples and when not enough
people hollered, did so. Still nobody hollared. So then they gassed Gypsies and Jews.

However, when l8th century writer
Jonathan Swift in his “ MODEST PROPOSAL” suggested that having the children of
the poor Catholic Irish cooked and eaten by the rich Presbyterians would solve
the problem of starving Catholics once and for all, that was not a similar
testing of the waters and a broaching of serious intent.

That was just mordant wit. I don’t know what
happened in the wake of Swift’s proposal ….although 115 years later, when the
Potato famine hit, the rich Prebyterian landowners did leave the poor Catholic
spud eaters to die of starvation when they could have easily
served soup in public kitchens, so maybe Swift was reading English minds. Not
quite a deliberate testing of the waters, though. Though who knows?

NEWT was different. History tells us that within months
of Newt’s Final Solution, Welfare was over with! So maybe GINGRICH was the
conservative right wing charm. His suggestion was so out there, that CLINTON’s
seemed SOOO much better.

The new, Clinton US welfare "reform" system was and is Grinchy to
the max as it forces parents to work at city jobs for slave pay, allowing city
to fire tenured workers. It forces mother to put even toddlers in daycare,
paying for it themselves, so very young children are separated from their
parents, creating dysfunctional, alienated children who turn into adults who
again, further down the line, abandon their own CHILDREN, creating CRIMINALS, violent
crime, incarceration as well as disease and plague from lack of medical care
and psychosis from stress and vitaminosis. (starvation.)And on all levels, the invasiveness of the social
worker scares the family silly.

Mommy Rabbit, your kiddies are so cute!
They don’t look like you.

Are they all from one father? Forgive me for being
nosy.

I'm the Welfare System. I'm here to HELP YOU!
SO….

How many men can we nail…..err,
the fathers’ names please?

Clinton
had other money saving ‘improvements’. Single mothers could only receive public aid for two years, then they
had to start cleaning freeways to pay back the city. This allowed the city to
fire union workers who had previously before being fired, earned three times
the money per hour and Medical and dental benefits. Suddenly Welfare was saving
the city money!

In
the years that followed the demise of guaranteed AFDC welfare and food stamp benefits to SINGLE
PARENTS WITH BABIES millions of
American children were added to the nearly two million already living in sub
poverty many without either of their parents.

By
1999 as many as 2.3 million children were in foster care or living in the homes
of grandparents, other relatives or friends, according to a recent report by
the RAND Corporation, the National Bureau of Economic Research and the
University of California.

In
California, under 900,000 families had aid. Among low-income children,
the share living without a biological, adoptive or stepparent in the household
rose a full percentage point, to 6 percent in 1999, up from 5 percent in 1997.
At thesame time there was a decline in the number of single parent families.

President
Bush, along with conservative and liberal politicians alike, hailed the
reduction of the number of one-parent families as a confirmation that the 1996
Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA)
promoted “family values.” If this refers to what exists in the human soul that
makes children feel nurtured, parented, and what makes a future generation of
nurtured children grow into nurturing adults, this is another Bush lie.

When
the PRWORA act comes up for reauthorization later this year, Bush wants
Congress to divert $100 million annually from federal welfare
dollars to programs designed to promote marriage.

New
research, however, indicates a large part of the decrease in the number of
single-parent families was due to parents being forced to abandon their children so
they could get a job under the welfare-to-work provisions of the new law. The
decline appeared to be the greatest among black families and accompanied
reports of record numbers of mothers entering the workforce.

By
analyzing smaller demographic groups within the larger population categories
used in earlier research, researchers produced evidence contradicting the
one-sided Bush optimism establishing a direct connection between welfare reform
and the breakup of families.

Recognizing
that welfare reform actually began in several states in the early 1990s, the
researchers compared the family status of children in 1989 with data compiled
up to March 2001. By looking back to years before any state had federal waivers
in place, they captured effects of welfare reform missed in earlier studies.

By
1996 half the states were employing federal waivers to dismantle various
aspects of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Federal legislation
in late 1996 changed the name of the federally-funded AFDC program to Temporary
Assistance for Needy Families (TANF).Funds were converted to block grants to
states and strict work requirements and lifetime time limits were imposed.

In
one population heavily impacted by welfare, black children living in the
central city, the longer states had experimented with welfare reform and the
more enthusiastically they enforced the new restrictions, the greater the
increase in children living with neither parent. After taking into account
other social factors, they estimated welfare reform led to a doubling of the
percentage of black central city children living with neither parent, or an
additional 206,000 persons. The authors note “it is rare in social science
research to find such large effects of policy on behavior.”

Another
trend they identified indicates that welfare reform is forcing women into
marriages that are likely to break up, with a higher incidence of separation
and divorce.

One
welfare official in the Bush administration cynically claimed welfare reform
was exposing unfit parents. The researchers showed, however, that households
where children went to live after being separated from their parents were no
better off financially than the ones they left.

Extreme
poverty in households with children The economic stresses on low-income
families are severe and increased between the mid-1990s and the end of the
decade, despite the record stock market boom. In April the Urban Institute
published a report showing 300,000 more persons in single-parent families lived
in extreme poverty in 1998 than in 1996. The researchers used a disposable
income measure including wages, government benefits and costs such as
childcare.

A
family of three is considered extremely poor when its income falls
below $7,135 (in 2001 dollars)or one-half the official poverty level.
Researchers acknowledged this threshold was probably too low because they did
not factor in increased out-of-pocket costs for medical care borne by parents
in low-paying jobs without health insurance.

July’s
issue of the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine reported on a survey
compiled by emergency room doctors and others in several cities across the
country. It showed increasing numbers of younger children unable to get enough
nutritious food to stay healthy, and pointed to the effects of full and partial
sanctions imposed on families by the 1996 legislation. The new law uses
sanctions to terminate or reduce benefits for infractions of rules including
those related to welfare-to-work. It also decreases benefits when changes in
income or expenses occur.

Children
three years old or younger in families whose welfare benefits had been
terminated or reduced were found to have a 50 percent higher risk of being food
insecure than those in families whose benefits had not been decreased. They
also had a 30 percent higher risk of having past hospitalizations and a 90
percent higher risk of being hospitalized at the time of an emergency room
visit.

In
families where welfare benefits had been reduced but not eliminated, young
children were still almost three times more likely to be admitted to the
hospital at an emergency room visit. These findings were true even though 80
percent of the children were receiving supplemental food under the Women’s,
Infants and Children’s (WIC) program and nearly all—94 percent—still qualified
for government-subsidized medical care.

In
Boston and Minneapolis researchers compared all US-born families, including
both those that had or never used welfare. There was a 40 percent higher risk
of being food insecure, a 30 percent higher risk of being underweight, and a 50
percent higher risk of being hospitalized during an ER visit in 2001 than there
had been two years earlier.

The
authors note that food stamps failed to mitigate the effects of sanctions or of
reductions in benefits even when the reduction resulted from increases in
earned income. Recession and unemployment add to family stresses

As
alarming as they seem, the previous reports reflect conditions before the
recession began in early 2001, i.e., while the economy was still experiencing
its longest expansion in postwar history. A report from the Children’s Defense
Fund, a liberal child advocacy group, indicates the situation has worsened
considerably in the past 15 months.

There
were high levels of unemployment among families with children by the end of
2001. From late 2000 to late 2001 the number of children with one or more
unemployed parents rose by 1.2million, or 41 percent. The one-year surge in
children with an unemployed parent wiped outmost of the reduction in children
with a jobless parent that occurred during the previous five years of economic
growth.

The
percentage of single mothers employed had increased from 63 percent in late
1995 to 74 percent in late 2000, and had accounted for more than half the
increase in working parents between 1995 and 2000. But between 2000 and late
2001 the number of unemployed single mothers rose by 25 percent, or 171,000
persons. Thus former welfare recipients who were exploited as low-wage labor
during the boom were among the first to be thrown out of work once the economic
downturn began.

Despite
the increase in need resulting from the effects of the recession, states
actually spent $546 million dollars less on cash assistance for low-income
families with children in 2001 than they did the year before. By 2001 all but
one state had families who had exceeded their time limits for TANF benefits and
were eligible to be barred from any assistance for the rest of their lives.

It’s a known fact that Welfare mothers
don’t picket. They can’t afford the bus ride to the Federal building or the
babysitters to care for children. Besides which, they’re all tuckered out from
cleaning freeways. But more and more Single mommies are coming online. So let’s
all read up on ARMCHAIR
ACTIVISM.A lesson in how to be a vociferous, noisy, useful activist
just knowing one thing: how to save files that are online and send them on.

"When we tolerate what we know to
be wrong--when we close our eyes and ears to

the corrupt because
we are too busy, or too frightened -- when we fail to speak

up and
speak out -- we strike a blow against freedom and decency and justice."—

Robert Francis Kennedy

"Let them call me a
rebel and I welcome it; I feel no concern from it; but I

should suffer the misery of demons should I make a whore of my soul". -
Thomas Paine

"By far the most
dangerous foe we have to fight is apathy -- indifference from

whatever cause, not from a lack of knowledge, but from carelessness, from

absorption in other pursuits, from a contempt bred of self satisfaction."--

William Osler

It is easy enough to tell the poor to
accept their poverty as God's will when you

yourself have warm clothes and plenty
of food and medical care and a roof over

your head and no worry about
the rent. But if you want them to believe you -- try

to share some of their poverty and see
if you can accept it as God's will